June 1, 1999.

Saint Jack has changed the resolution on my computer...and I love it! All the letters are really tiny and I can read Man About Mulfreesboro without scrolling across. It's the small pleasures, you know.

Speaking of small pleasures, I put Javina's tape in the mail today. If you've been following her journal (and you should, if for no other reason than the fact that she's really good at making you feel right there in the room or on the end of a private email...something I'm not as good at), then you know how things are with her. I.e. not too good. I'm worried. There's been a lot of careful discussion about suicide in her journal and it scares me. Today I actually wondered if she'd be around to receive the package.

But what do you say to someone who knows more about the system and the experience and her own life than you? Can you counter such depth of knowledge with a trite 'get some sleep, eat some cookie dough and veg out; you'll feel better in the morning'? I can't. I'm simply not that arrogant.

Surprisingly enough.

In somewhat more positive news, the Angry Young Man from my Renaissance history tutorial was a non-issue today, as I skipped that hour altogether. I was tied up in creating an essay proposal containing "a bibliography of AT LEAST three primary sources, four articles, and three books you plan to use in the paper." I'd allotted myself an hour this afternoon...in practice it took for-bloody-ever.

In the first place, I hadn't read all that explicit crap over until I had one hour to class. I had a vague idea of what I was supposed to do, but I had no idea that I was supposed to be halfway done my friggin' essay tonight (sorry. I'm just used to professors that say "come up with a topic and hand in the paper 13 weeks from now." No baby-steps. No essay proposal crap.)

But I'm mostly upset because I'm not used to second year courses any more. I'm not used to the constant handholding and I'm not used to the more basic level of discourse. I was marked down on my last paper because I failed to define my terms in explicit technicolour detail. This simply doesn't come up in upper year English courses...all the professors know the terminology, the texts and usually all available scholarship, so I don't need to spend time defining things. And in upper year courses, you don't have to hand in essay stages weeks in advance - which helps, because I do the absolute minimum of preparation for my essays. I've never read through about a dozen of them even once. Last year I didn't even read the poem I based half an essay on.

In other words, I'm used to getting away with sloppiness. I'm used to professors writing "interesting ideas, however your overall structure is weak (especially on pages__)" in much harder courses.

And the fact that it's an easy course only adds to my frustration. It's a second year course. I should be kicking it squaw in the nuts. Instead I'm running in circles of my own devising.

Bah.